The present invention concerns an apparatus suitable for receiving and transferring sheet materials, joined to each other as a continuous strip and tearable or severable for example such as the forms processed or used in data processing centers.
In recent years ever growing diffusion has been acquired by electro-accounting and data processing systems, such as electro-accounting stations associated with computers, wherein preformed forms (eventually previously hollow-punched for the so-called self-enveloping types) are processed by the printing machines, especially fast printing machines such as the so called laser printers, the forms being fed to the printing machine from form packages united as a continuous strip and folded in accordion like manner.
After the processing by the printing machine, the forms are again accordion-like refolded into packages and subsequently separated into single forms by use of weakening or tearing lines between each form and the adjacent ones. To date the forms as processed by the printing machine were collected into packages corresponding to similar packages in the feeding station which were manually transferred to successive operations, with evident waste of time and manpower. Since new fast printing machines, for example laser printers, came into use, a package consisting of one thousand or more forms is exhausted within a few minutes, whereby it is thus manifest that down times both in the loading of a new form package and in the removal of the already processed form package will heavily affect the production rate of the printing machine and hence of the data processing center.
As regards the feeding stage of the forms to the printing machine, the problem has been faced and solved by means of apparatus for the automatic splicing of the last form or sheet (i.e. the "tail" of the form strip) of a package of forms (in particular that one which is still being fed to a printing machine), with the first form or sheet (i.e. the "head" of the aforestated strip) of a subsequent package so that exhaustion of the package being fed does not cause any interruption of the feeding and thus of the operation of the printing machine.